‘The real danger of the present discourse is that we are conflating an air pollution initiative with climate change ones’

• ON the ULEZ battle, after the Uxbridge by-election, Sadiq Khan is right to call on the United Kingdom government for extra funding for the scrappage scheme.

But let us not forget it’s very much Boris Johnson’s baby after it was devised in 2015 and then kicked into the long grass by him.

Though the real danger of the present discourse is that we are conflating an air pollution initiative with climate change ones.

As the chemistry is quite simple, ULEZ is aimed principally to reduce NOx and PMs and not CO2. Rightly so given what we know increasingly of the adverse impacts of air pollution on our health.

As a result of making the wrong parallels, we forget that congestion charge expansion into west London had a similar public reaction before the 2008 GLA election.

So that is where the lessons should be learned for the expansion of the ULEZ across the whole of Greater London rather than how Londoners feel about climate emergency policies and responses from Westminster’s citizens’ climate assembly are likely to show.

MURAD QURESHI
@MuradQureshiLDN
www.muradqureshi.com